“The Striving”: Eliot's Difficult Ethics

Abstract

Responding to the new modernist studies' attempts to interrogate the boundaries between high and low cultural artifacts, this essay historicizes T. S. Eliot's cultural prose, including his Criterion commentaries and longer works, to argue for his interventionism. Although recent studies continue Raymond Williams's assessment in Culture and Society that the impossible implementation of Eliot's organicist cultural project speaks to his lack of systematic coherence, his emphasis on ethical rectitude over direct action does not necessarily indicate diffidence in his religious goals. Instead, the efficacy Eliot discovered within uncomfortable and difficult intellectual states is related to his cultural project, which banks its success on his prose's structural and thematic resemblance to religious mystery. Eliot's ethical priorities render his writings from protestations into transformative and conversional vehicles, providing the non-violent vehicle for the Christian Society he favors.